Myr

yes! Doing it on purpose instead of having to re-order your weekend plans around it.

The Announcement feature does not work like that. And as @Cia said, we are not duplicating content since the blog post already links to all the stories.

I've just enjoyed, and I use the term loosely, an Internet free weekend. This was not my desire in the least. The several-year-old network interface board for Verizon FiOS decided to die Friday afternoon. The tech was able to replace it fairly quickly, thankfully. Unfortunately, it wasn't until Monday morning that they got around to getting here to do it. The only internet access I had over the weekend was through my phone. That means that time I would normally have for taking care of stuff around here was totally zapped. This includes being able to write one of the more detailed blogs that show up here on Tuesdays. I'm writing this as I'm overdue for bed because like Winter is Coming, so does Work. To our authors, if you've noticed the "Respond to Review" option now showing up on reviews... don't use it. Stories doesn't know what to do with it yet so, you'll just get an error when you submit whatever you write. I've reported it to our programmer, so it should be included when we roll the next version out. It's currently going through bug squashing. The weekend without internet, when I actually had time to work on it, didn't help. Anyway, I will hopefully have more a more helpful blog next week

I've seen that concept before in my readings. I can't remember if it was fanfics somewhere or Eragon or elsewhere.

I have added it to the sidebar for now. I've also added it to the Our Picks section which is at the bottom of the main page and in the Activity drop down on the main menu

With the update to 4.3.X version of the forums, the underlying software allows for a single reply to a review from the content owner. This feature support has not been rolled out into the Stories Module (yet). As I've been without useful internet since Friday, I'm a touch behind on the software stuff, so, it'll be awhile yet until that feature is in and working. I think.

It sounds like you had a corrupted cookie/cache and it corrected itself.

I really enjoyed Eragon when I read it years ago. I liked the sequel as well and then I was so tied up I never finished reading the series. I have them in my giant pile... but I still haven't gotten back to them. I really need to, since I did enjoy the book so much. Has anyone else read this? What do you think?

I'll add it to my evergrowing list. The system is tested and works when you post a chapter immediately or post a chapter for publishing at a set time. As soon as you start doing edits on an unpublished chapter, whether that is unpublished or unpublished and set for a posting time, it's starts doing strange things. There is also possibly a malfunctioning date based security feature. The system is made to publish stories... not use it at a word processor. Best advice until we sort things out... Don't put anything into the system until it is ready to publish. Use the Preview button. It works. Publish immediately. For the love of all that is holy, if it doesn't post looking correct, do not unpublish. Just edit it immediately. When you publish, it triggers the notifications and when you unpublish after that, it triggers support requests saying such and such a story was announced but is now missing.

What was the timeframe between saving it unpublished and publishing publicly?

@Daddydavek I'm more at this point...

As we roll ever closer to Armeggedon... er.. the go date for GDPR, Invision, the software company for the forum software is releasing another update to specifically address the ongoing concerns of pretty much anyone running anything on the Internet. We will be rolling the update ASAP. It is set to release Tuesday (Today). Some features in it: Downloading personal data. One of the requirements of GDPR is to be able to provide what personal data is tracked. They've added a feature to create an export file of personal data. Deleting Members. We now have the option to anonymize data when we delete a member. As a reminder, in most cases where users have content posted, we delete your account and leave the content per the Terms of Service you Agreed to upon joining and re-agreed to if you are logged in and reading this. As a general rule, deleting content causes community disruption and we avoid that wherever possible. But we can now easily strip said content of anything the EU considers to be personal data. The Privacy Policy page gets more updates as well. Currently, there are a lot of third-party services that integrate with the forum software and any of them that are used, have their own privacy policy. The system will now automatically display said policies and thus allow us to simplify our own. We are also working through the bugs on the new story update as well. This is the update that will put all the sorting and filtering right at your fingertips. I leave you with a current image: As you can see, we have the theme working on the test server. This shows Stories I follow sorted by word count (most)

Of all the times Batman has been in movie form, the first two movies in Chris Nolan's reboot top them. Batman Begins gives the gritty, more realistic and most important of all, less campy version of Batman. This movie hit all the right notes and was only really topped by it immediate sequel, the Dark Knight. (And then pissed away in that god-awful mess called the Dark Knight Rises. I swear Nolan purposely trashed that movie so that no one would ask him to make another) Anyway, Batman Begins set the stage. Well worth it.

If you have somehow stumbled through life and not read this, you really should. I just loved that the history department head at my school, assigned this book. Far too many of the current generation indoctrinated on BS need something to wake them up.

@BHopper2 @northie@Headstall The way I view genre tagging on a story is there should be 1 to 3. More than that and you either have a much larger than normal story (Circumnavigation anyone?) or are a bit experimental or unfocused. For example, I usually tag genres as primary and secondary. Science Fiction and Adventure, for example. The longer the story, the more likely you'll have 3 genres. With my own stories, my short stories have 1 or 2 tags and my longest one has 3 and they legitimately hit on those elements. @Graeme right now the data is completely manual manipulation in Excel. I'm an Excel generalist and not a superuser so it would take quite awhile to gather that.

A few weeks back, our tech guru extraordinaire, A.J., compiled the reading stats to date for me. I poked them around to see what I could see and I made a little pie chart for everyone. Now, any math person will tell you that you need context to understand what that means. So here are the relevant details: Data is compiled based on "reads" from Jan-April 2018. This is about one quarter of the year. The data shown here represents 2.89 million views, which compromised the top 717 stories. The cut off for that number was 1000 views in the time period. Stories can (and do) have more than one genre listed on them. The displayed data was compiled this way: Stories were ranked by most views Jan-April All stories with more than 1000 views were left in. We counted up the number of times a genre was tagged in those stories. The pie shows the proportion of stories so tagged. As you can see, people are reading Romance and Drama in high numbers. Though, to be honest, many of the stories on the site are tagged with Romance in addition to whatever else someone wanted to be listed. Western is not shown but is half the size of Paranormal. Enhanced story stats will be part of a future update to Stories.

It's at your end. Try logging off the site and back in. If that doesn't work, try clearing the cache.

I forgot to set this to post this morning... oops. This is one of those late 90's action movies full of one-liners. And it features Samuel L. Jackson doing his thing as a BAMF. If you haven't seen it and you like action movies and one-liners, this is a good movie.

Thanks so much for your comments. I'm trying to get more writing time in

This is another coming-of-age story by Mercedes Lackey that she does so well. This story is powerful and emotional, like so many of Mercedes Lackey's first book in a new series. (This is a pattern with her. Pretty much every first book in a series she does is a powerful coming of age story). The dragons in this story are fairly unique compared to others. They are characters in their own right, though not speaking or human intelligence. They are definitely not stupid either. If you haven't read this story, and you like fantasy, this is definitely worth a read.

We are jumping back to Fall of 2011 - Legends

Depends on your notifications: https://www.gayauthors.org/notifications/options/ For content you follow, you'll get online notification if the left check mark is checked. And Emails if the Right check mark is checked. In this case, I do NOT get emails. Stories also allows for notifications for other things: In theory, if you Follow an Author, you'll get alerted if they post a new story. If you follow a story, you'll get alerted to new Chapter. If you select any of the options in Stories section of notifications (Shown above), then you should get notified in those cases as well. I'm saying should here because we've had an issue with not everyone getting notified every time when they should. Something we're still working on.

There has been a lot of news lately about Privacy and information breaches all over the place. Combine that with the new EU law, GDPR, going into effect on May 26th, and every internet company on Earth has been bombarding you with alerts, messages, and requests for re-agreements. The amount of regulation that you have to deal with as a small business is frankly crushing. As the laws were written by technical half-wits (and I'm being generous), the law is written in such a way as that everyone is in violation of the law in some way or another unless you have a large team of well-paid lawyers making everything more complicated and messy. The USA wasn't to be outdone and passed a moronic Anti-Sex Trafficking Bill... that basically puts every company that operates on the Internet in harm's way....unless you have an army of lawyers. Expect more changes as we make adjustments to make sure we are well inside what's allowed by these laws. In the meantime, you can find our most up-to-date Privacy Policy linked at the bottom of every page: You can find the Rules/Terms of Service/Guidelines for the site under the Help Menu as Guidelines: The Terms of Service Short form is here: https://www.gayauthors.org/terms/ It links to the full Guidelines as well. Opt-in for Site News We have the capability of emailing members from time to time via the system. This is a strictly opt-in system and we had people cycle that some time ago. If you wish to change your current status for on-site email contact, you can go to your Notification settings here: https://www.gayauthors.org/notifications/options/ For people that Subscribe to the Read! Write! Enjoy! site newsletter, there will be a new opt-in going out soon so that we comply with the new EU GDPR law. Keep an eye out for that.

This is an oldie but goodie. The visuals in this movie are stunning, especially when you consider it came out in 1984. It has long fueled my thoughts of space and space exploration. It is also a much tighter story, unlike the very plodding 2001. Sci-Fi movies suffered from long, slow scenes to soaring music in the 1965- 1980 timeset. You can see this in the first Alien movie, the first Star Trek Movie (The Motion Picture), and to a lesser extent Star Wars. I think Star Wars was the one to start breaking towards action faster. Anyway, someone beat on Arthur C. Clarke to get him to cough up some explanations for the weird near acid trip of 2001: A Space Odessy. I'd like 2001 a lot more if it cut out about an hour. 2010, probably over-explains, but it makes more sense. Anyway, I strongly recommend this movie, just for the cool visuals of Jupiter, though it is also well acted.

This and Mario have me looking. I figured a couple other things would pop up. I'm really liking the look of Detroit: Become Human. Those more narrative games are good for relaxing at times. The only thing stopping me from going out right now is that I don't have time to play anyway. lol. So, I'll wait until a big sale comes along and snag something.